Sacred Blood
Producer Kang Seong-gyu had gone out to investigate D Church and failed to return by the appointed hour. Manager Jeong, who oversaw the station’s current-affairs programming, was livid. The whole project had begun as an investigation into D Church’s previous pastor, and had already escalated into a full-blown incident when congregants stormed the broadcast building. And now the man responsible for the mess was nowhere to be found.
“Damn it! Drag that bastard back here right now! What the hell is he doing out there?”
Even with one of his producers missing, the manager showed not the slightest concern. Concern was the wrong word, really. It was more like the irritation of a man who had misplaced a voodoo doll. Reporter Seong Yeon-cheol tried to offer an explanation.
“He said he was headed to D Church’s prayer retreat. Not so much running away as prepping the next segment…”
“Shut up! You’re giving me a headache—just be quiet! If that’s the kind of place it is, you send a reporter. Who does he think he is, poking around himself? You know this is going to blow up!”
Manager Jeong kept grumbling as if even chewing Kang Seong-gyu’s raw flesh wouldn’t cool him down.
“Hey! Reporter Seong! You go.”
“Sir?”
“I said go find him.”
“H-how? He’s not answering his phone.”
“Go there yourself. Call that prayer retreat or whatever it is!”
The manager barked as if he meant to brew scorched-rice tea straight from a well. Missing for a few days and they already wanted someone dispatched to hunt him down. Reporter Seong’s anger spiked all the way to the crown of his head, but there was nothing he could do. In a place like this, the first rule of survival was to grab a manager’s seat and dig in. Running around outside only burned energy and earned you nothing.
“There aren’t many people in Current Affairs working this particular project. Is it really all right if I go?”
“Go.”
Whether the man was thinking at all was anyone’s guess. Granted, they still had two weeks of programming banked, so the schedule wouldn’t collapse—but every other reporter in Current Affairs was already drowning in work. Wasting manpower on a manhunt felt absurd. Still, what choice did he have? “When they say jump, you jump” was the golden rule that applied everywhere in Korean society.
“Damn it.”
Reporter Seong began packing for the trip exactly as ordered. Kang wasn’t answering family calls either, and his phone stayed dead. Outside the station, D Church congregants were staging daily, increasingly violent protests against the current-affairs desk’s program—and the man at the center of it all had simply vanished. The possibility that “those people” were involved had already crossed everyone’s mind. Either way, a current-affairs team filing a missing-person report with the police was unthinkable; they would have to find him themselves.
“Well, if they really did kill Producer Kang, that’d be a jackpot. Instant scoop.”
Was he supposed to feel grateful for the manager’s magnanimous gift of this assignment? Muttering under his breath, Reporter Seong shoved back his chair and stood.
“All right, please fill in your occupation here. And check the box for tithing.”
The woman, who looked like a church volunteer, smiled sweetly as she spoke. Se-geon stared at her, puzzled.
“Tithing? What’s that?”
“It’s offering one-tenth of your earnings to the Lord. It’s written right there in the Law.”
She explained the concept with earnest thoroughness. Se-geon had written “unemployed” in the occupation field, so even if he had wanted to tithe, he couldn’t. Still, the idea of collecting a tithe that had been abolished in the West by the early nineteenth century felt deeply suspicious.
Well, it’s not my money going out the door. Whatever.
He filled out the membership card. It was a fake file, and the system didn’t seem particularly computerized, so it probably wouldn’t matter.
“Then may you believe in Jesus and be saved.”
“Ah… right.”
Se-geon kept his expression as soft as he could manage. Infiltration into D Church itself seemed to have succeeded. The real problem was how to get a look at the Great Holy Spirit Revival Meeting. That was Pastor Park’s specialty, but he only conducted it twice a year.
“This is going to take a while…”
Anointing prayers, on the other hand, appeared to be offered regularly. The catch was that Se-geon had no plausible reason to request one. He was healthy, had no fixed address, and didn’t even live in Incheon. How was he supposed to ask?
Outside the church, local shopkeepers had hung protest banners. Slogans like “Evil Heretical Church—Pastor Park Jin-young Must Go!” and other lurid black-letter attacks were enough to make even an outsider frown. Koreans, ever polite, could have a knife twisted in their guts and still lose the argument the moment they stopped speaking with perfect manners; the opponent would simply be branded “crude, uncivilized, and lacking dignity,” and that label alone would decide the winner.
Outsiders never cared who was actually right. The side that looked polished always got the nod. That was why a National Assembly member could be pilloried for swearing on the floor, yet pocket tens of billions through the back door while remaining the picture of courtesy and still receive respect.
Se-geon, for his part, felt nothing for the merchants—whether they ended up selling their shops to the church for pennies and fled in tears or not. He had approached D Church solely to investigate the power behind it. The merchants’ rights were irrelevant.
Looks like I’m about to live the life of a religious man I was never meant for.
With that thought, Se-geon began attending services regularly while quietly gathering detailed information on the prayer retreat and the church’s various affiliated organizations. The building, however, bristled with private security systems and CCTV cameras in every corner. No one installed defenses that thorough unless they had something to hide.
Still, Se-geon soon found an easy opportunity to witness an anointing prayer—not at the Great Holy Spirit Revival, but at the dawn prayer meetings frequented by the desperate.
That morning Pastor Park emerged in splendid vestments. For a split second Se-geon wondered if the man might actually be the Pope. Of course the Pope belonged to Catholicism, and D Church—though branded heretical—was still Protestant. Where ordinary Protestantism emphasized diligence, sincerity, and thrift rooted in Puritan teaching, this place preached the gospel of the offering plate. Se-geon’s own family was Catholic; he had attended Mass as a boy, and there the collection box simply made the rounds.
He had assumed other churches did the same. Yet D Church, as if determined to advertise its heresy, insisted on payment in its own internal currency: the talent. Talents could also be spent at the church store, but their real purpose seemed to be tracking how much each believer had donated. Record the conversion into talents and you had a neat ledger of offerings; the store itself sold nothing of real consequence, so the money’s path was obvious.
Clearly a megachurch of this size had its own management philosophy. Se-geon found it absurd, but to avoid suspicion he dropped thirty talents into the plate and passed it on. The constant collection at every service seemed burdensome, yet talents always overflowed, so perhaps not.
Pastor Park began his sermon. What started as empty rhetoric inevitably concluded with a demand for more offerings. After that came the moment Se-geon had been waiting for: the anointing prayer for those in need.
“Brothers and sisters who are sick, those who require the Lord’s grace—come forward, one by one.”
At the pastor’s words, the people who had been waiting in the front row rose at once. Pastor Park began to mutter something.
“….”
It was pure noise—words no sane person could parse. Speaking in tongues. Whether deliberate or not, some of the congregation foamed at the mouth and tried to imitate him. If this was what it looked like when the Holy Spirit descended, then shamans deserved the same title.
This is enough to drive a man insane.
In that moment Se-geon honestly considered abandoning the investigation, drawing the gun under his jacket, and simply shooting every last one of them. They had cherry-picked fragments of Old Testament totalitarianism, expanded them at will, and built a fanatical system for their own convenience.
If they collected tithes because the Law commanded it, then they should also obey every other statute in Leviticus. Female congregants would have to track their menstrual cycles and stay away from church while bleeding; meat would have to be selected and slaughtered according to kosher rules. They insisted they were nothing like Judaism—yet clung to the Jewish tithe with rapturous affection.
Worse, the tongues themselves were pure delirium to an atheist—no, to someone who actively despised the idea of gods. If there was any real difference between a person speaking in tongues under the Holy Spirit and a shaman thrashing about, foam-flecked, possessed by a spirit… then for God’s sake, could they at least look a little more dignified? From the outside the two spectacles were indistinguishable. Nowhere had Jesus Christ instructed anyone to speak in tongues, yet these people envied those “touched by the Spirit” and simply copied the noise. At least that was how it looked to Se-geon.
He buried the hostility deep, fixed a look of wonder on his face, and kept his hands clasped.
Then the anointing began. Pastor Park’s expression shifted from the earlier frenzy to perfect calm—though Se-geon did not miss the cold sneer that flickered at the corner of the man’s mouth the instant composure returned. Most people received little more than a vigorous pounding and were sent on their way. The real problem arrived with a trauma case: an old woman who had fallen and cracked her pelvic bone. She had endured the agony, skipped the hospital, and come here instead.
“Lord, heal this wounded soul. I believe in the work of the Holy Spirit! Hallelujah!”
The pastor brought forward a bowl of red liquid—unmistakably blood—cut the patient’s skin, and carefully poured the crimson fluid drop by drop, as though terrified of wasting a single bead. To the faithful it might have looked like sacred reverence. To Se-geon it simply looked like thrift.
“It’s the Sacred Blood!”
That was what the people called it. The blood, they claimed, had flowed from the side of D Church’s statue of Jesus in 1999, and it possessed miraculous power to heal wounds. Whether it truly came from a statue of Jesus or from a vampire, Se-geon could tell at a glance. A cracked coccyx was nothing special for vampire blood; the healing was trivial.
To first-time witnesses, however, watching even the fresh cut seal itself before their eyes was pure wonder. That single demonstration was more than enough to captivate the congregation. Their entire religious outlook—chasing real-world miracles and worldly success—was endlessly simple and transactional. Even the spiritual force of Buddhism that once moved Hermann Hesse degenerated, upon arrival in Korea, into little more than wish-fulfillment; every college-entrance day the thresholds of temples nationwide were worn smooth. In that sense, perhaps it was simply the destiny of Korean religious consciousness.
Hmm…
Pastor Park, for his part, was nearly driven to distraction by the young man sitting quietly in the corner. The youth with the carefully combed bleached hair had suddenly begun attending services with suspicious diligence. Hidden in his eyes was the killing intent of a predator sizing up prey. Even the exposé producer who had come before never carried that look; the difference was that between a beast and a rat. A man who merely wants to dig up secrets and a man who wants to take a life carry different eyes and a different posture from the start.
I’ll have to be careful.
Feeling real fear, Pastor Park brought the service to a close. Those who had raved since dawn left charged with vitality and wonder through their trance. The anointing prayer satisfied their hunger for miracles; therefore it was good. Even if the miracle came not from the Holy Spirit but from vampire blood.
Before climbing into his car, Reporter Seong checked his mail on the PDA that doubled as a phone. The world had grown convenient enough that gadgets like this could be had for almost nothing, yet they remained a nuisance—especially this one, which devoured battery power so greedily that no amount of charging kept it alive for long. Then again, these days you could recharge almost anywhere, so it was only a minor inconvenience.
“Hmm… wait.”
Among the messages he found one from Producer Kang. The file was tiny and the sending address was a mobile number; it almost certainly had something to do with the case. Sending text messages as email was one of Kang’s favorite tricks, though why the man preferred it to a normal text remained a mystery.
The message was brutally concise—military code without the encryption. Reporter Seong clicked his tongue in disbelief. D Church was already sitting on the planning desk, so of course they would look into it, but a prayer retreat?
“I’ll have to check the area first. Inje, Wontong… that’s a long damn way.”
He got into the car and turned the key.
Back in his inn room, Se-geon called Bill Murray and laid out the situation.
“So they’re definitely using vampire blood for this. But so what? There are plenty of places besides you to get vampire blood.”
Se-geon practically shouted into the receiver. He had only stuck around because he had nothing better to do, and now he saw no reason to keep hanging around. Idle or not, lingering in a place like that made him fear he might catch the same madness himself.
Fearing you’ll go mad at this late stage is ridiculous, of course.
He rose from the bed. A vampire was unquestionably behind D Church. But where? Unless it was a Jinma who could walk in broad daylight, its movements would be limited; it would need darkness—some place light never reached. The church storeroom? No. Too many people coming and going. The main sanctuary was far too crowded to hide a vampire. There might be annexes, but Se-geon’s thoughts turned instead to the prayer retreat. Deep in the mountains, in quiet Wontong—it sounded like a perfect natural fortress for a vampire to hide.
“Was this the prayer retreat address?”
He pulled a memo from his pocket. Unfortunately it was only a post-office box. Letters and parcels could be sent there; the actual location was a secret. Still, asking at the post office ought to clear that up easily enough.
The problem was the way Pastor Park had been looking at him—none too kindly.
“He’s already sniffed out something about me, hasn’t he?”
Se-geon removed his non-prescription glasses and checked out of the inn. He had filled the membership card with mostly false information anyway; even if they grew suspicious, the trail would go cold. He kicked his bike to life and tore off toward Wontong.
Spring seemed ready to skip straight into summer; the air was sweltering. Grasshoppers and other insects whirred everywhere. Riding the bike, Se-geon had to ease off the throttle when locusts and the like smashed against his helmet and burst. He could hardly afford to wallpaper himself in insects.
“Summer’s already in full swing.”
It was only early April, yet midday heat rivaled high summer. Newspapers and radio called it this year’s abnormal weather, but in Se-geon’s memory the same “abnormal” pattern had repeated for five years running. It was already Korea’s new normal, and no one could seriously argue otherwise. People even claimed mosquitoes had become perennial now.
Yet riding slowly had its own quiet charm. Passing between avenues of fresh green trees, the leaf-shadows resting on his head, he caught the clean scent of the woods. Even through the helmet the fragrance of trees wrapped around his whole body, clean and sharp. For a man steeped in blood like Se-geon, was life still something worth living after all?
For the first time in a long while he savored the feeling of a proper tour, winding the bike through the mountains and rivers of Gangwon Province. He was traveling alone, yet roaming places like this left him feeling light. Climbing Bukhansan had been for the same lightness, and he was content. Just a short escape from Seoul, and already his heart felt this easy…